Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/121114-how-to-protect-your-search-engine-rankings
A fairly recent article by Nelson Tan provides some background information on search engine rankings and discusses how internet users can protect those rankings. There are several problems that can result in a penalty. One is that fake webmasters utilize hidden text to artificially increase their link popularity. Some webmasters make their keywords invisible to everyone on their sites. When a spider (a program that search engines use to index web pages) sees these invisible words, it increases that site’s page rank. The next problem is called “keyword stuffing.” A search engine uses “keyword density” (the ratio of keywords to the other words on the site) to see if a page is attempting to artificially improve their ranking. “Cloaking” is another problem, which occurs when the server directs a user to a site and a search engine spider to a different page. The page that the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is not visible to regular users, and it is purposely created to raise the site’s search engine ranking.
The article connects to the topic of popularity as being a network phenomenon that is characterized by extreme imbalances. It presents advice for users to protect their search engine rankings. Search engines use backlinks to determine the popularity of a particular web page. The more links to a site, the higher that site’s page rank. The popularity of links is based mainly on the quality of web pages that you are linked to. Google established this criterion for assigning page ranks, and almost all search engines currently use it. Also, the company often imposes penalties on pages linking to others to artificially enhance the link popularity; those sites are labeled as “bad neighborhoods.”
A page’s rank on search engines is important in marketing campaigns, and there are methods to legitimately improve the link popularity. Unfortunately, the internet is filled with insincere webmasters looking to boost their link popularity by faking search engines. Search engines are now attentive to “spam” sites and pages that have artificially increased their rankings. When a search engine finds such a site, it lowers the ranking of that page or removes it from the search engine’s index. However, some high-quality genuine sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals.
-bluebear
Having read your article, I have been alerted to cloaking and am wondering if that is the reason I am struggling with Page Rank for a couple of my sites. Everything else is okay, but they both have cloaked links.
I am not sure about that, but it does seem likely that cloaking is affecting your Page Rank, if there is no other problem.